Working in Isolation: Survey Examines Struggles with Loneliness on the Job

In May—corresponding with Mental Health Awareness Month—Gallup shared survey results that highlighted the social and emotional benefits of forging friendships in the workplace.

Throughout the past four years, for instance, Gallup has studied the role of workplace friendships in helping employees maintain their well-being. The Washington, D.C.-based analytics and advisory organization determined that, while forming bonds with colleagues is crucial to worker well-being, many employees don’t have someone they consider to be a “best work friend.”

In June 2022, for example, Gallup found that just 21% of employed Americans said they “definitely” had someone they consider their best friend on the job. That figure represented a 6% drop from 2022.

More recently, Gallup’s Alok Patel and Stephanie Plowman stressed the importance of having a best office buddy in the post-COVID era, as more organizations have embraced remote and hybrid work models that put more physical distance between co-workers.

In the midst of the pandemic, for example, “employees found the social and emotional support from their best friends at work to be more critical than ever to get them through challenging times,” Patel and Plowman wrote in January 2024.

New Gallup data, however, finds that some workers are still struggling to find this type of support on the job.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace: 2024 Report examined, among other things, the sense of isolation that some employees have reported experiencing in recent years.

Overall, Gallup found 20% of working men and women saying they felt lonely “a lot of the day” at work the previous day. That number ticked slightly upward among workers younger than 35, with 22% of employees in that age group saying they experienced loneliness throughout much of the previous day. Job level seemed to have little connection to on-the-job loneliness, according to Gallup.

Of the many variables that Gallup analyzed, work location was the biggest contributing factor to employees’ loneliness. At 25%, fully remote workers reported much higher levels of loneliness than those working strictly on-site (16%). Twenty-one percent of hybrid workers said they had experienced loneliness at work.

Work itself, however, can help eliminate feelings of isolation, according to Gallup. This year’s State of the Global Workplace report saw 32% of unemployed survey participants saying they’ve recently experienced loneliness, compared to the 20% of working adults saying the same.

And, the emotional and social boost that being at work provides gets bigger as employee engagement goes up, wrote Ryan Pendell, a senior workplace science editor at Gallup, in a recent summary of some of the report’s key findings.

“This positive effect is much stronger,” wrote Pendell, “as employee engagement rises. If employees are actively disengaged, they are almost as likely to be lonely as those who are unemployed. If employees are engaged—if they find their work meaningful and feel connected to their team members and organization—their likelihood of loneliness is substantially lower.”